Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Construction of the new Flying Fish brewery in Somerdale is really starting to come together.

There's still boatloads to do, after all, it's a quite an undertaking to set up an automated brewery that will triple the size of the one that has been producing 15,000 barrels of beer annually for a while now.

But on Monday, some more key pieces to the puzzle began falling into place. The brewery took delivery of six more tanks (fermenters and bright beer) from fabricators Paul Mueller Company of Springfield, Missouri.

The tanks arrived in pairs on flatbed trucks, and then, one by one, each was hoisted up to the roof and lowered through a hatch (specially created this purpose) and into the building.

From there, each tank was moved a few feet by forklift to make room for the next one. The tanks will be set on the concrete pad adjacent to the brewhouse over the balance of this week.

The work that took place Monday was the same process that played out back in February when the first round of fermenters and other tanks arrived from Mueller. The brewhouse equipment, custom made in Germany, arrived back in late January.

So when is all of this stuff going to be pressed into service to make beer? Well, that's a question best answered by the folks at Flying Fish (they say test brewing could start in May). But whenever that day comes, to quote Dr. Emmet Brown, "you're gonna see some serious shit."

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What? Never Heard of Me?

I'm a freelance editor, writer, video producer, photographer, graphic artist and, obviously, a beer fan (homebrewer, too) ... I've even lent a hand at a commercial brewery in NJ (where else?!!??) and created some ads for a brewery that were published in Ale Street News and All About Beer.
My first taste of beer was a few sips of Falstaff at age 5 in 1965 (yes, I was drinking underage – in a simpler period of time, too). I continued to develop a taste for beer, but alas, poor Yorick, I left Shakespeare (and Falstaff) behind (but I did write about beer for my college composition 101 class, got an A on it, too).